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Eleven pages today. I’ve listened to Christmas music, and musicals all day. Same as yesterday. My anxiety is off the charts. It was a very emotional scene. I tried to take myself back from my book. I tried to not care as much about my characters and my plot. I tried to be more like some of the writers I know. They don’t seem to suffer with their characters the way I do. I tried to find some emotional distance. I’ve been struggling for days with that artificial distance. Because for me, it is artificial. For me, I love my characters. And if you love someone, you feel for their pain. You care, truly care, about them.
I tried to write and not care. I tried to take some of myself back from my writing, and found that for me, at least, it’s all about the caring. If I don’t care, I don’t want to write. Emotionally, I felt better, personally. But the writing was agony. Not the agony of emotional turmoil, but the agony of emptiness. It just didn’t matter. If I don’t care at all, why write?
Some writers are intrigued by ideas. Some by the fact that it’s a hot topic and they think they can make money. Some, are all about plot, and the mystery. I can write a short piece where it’s idea driven. I find that any book with a mystery as it’s skeleton is easier for me to write. I’ve never set down to write something simply because I thought it would sell well. In fact, I’ve spent most of my career writing things that everyone told me would not sell. Boy, am I glad I didn’t listen to all the nay-sayers. But, first and foremost, I am a character writer. It is the voice and lives of my characters that make me want to set down at the computer, or pick up a pen.
It looks sort of peaceful, those writers that get that emotional distance between themselves and their work. But it’s not where I work. I work in a place that is messy, because real people are messy. I write from a place where things hurt, and surprise, and you get thrown completely around, because real life does that.
I’m back to writing all nerve endings and emotion. I’ve left the land of peacefulness behind me. For it is not my land, not truly. In my real life, I strive for it, but in my writing, I can let that part of me that would wreck my real life, go. I can chase it, catch it, and have it chase me. Raw and horrible, exciting and amazing, the depths and heights of it all.
The writing had been crawling. Today it ran. The difference? I stopped trying to be above it all. I crawled down off that distant over-seeing pedestal, and got down to work. I may work in an office, but in my heart, I’m a roll-your-sleeves-up-and-put-your-shoulder-to-the-grind-stone-kind-of-girl. Let’s put some muscle into it. Let’s see some sweat and tears. If you don’t bleed a little for your writing, then it’s not art, it’s just a paycheck.